Menachem Begin believed that the Jewish people deserved a homeland so as to avoid that ash the first time because it was the natural right of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient homeland. That was his conviction, even of no anti-Semitism even existed.

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Few topics arouse the ire of Time Magazine's political columnist Joe
Klein more than Israeli or American Jewish conservatives or traditionalists.
When he writes about them, historicity and facts become secondary to his own
personal animus.

Such is the case with the journalist's book review of Lawrence Wright's
“Thirteen Days in September,” published in the Sept. 14, 2014 New York Times Sunday Book Review supplement. Mr. Klein uses his review of a book
about the 1978 Camp David negotiations as an opportunity to vent his own
hostility against former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was a major
player in the negotiations and resulting accords, as well as a traditionalist
and a conservative.

In Mr. Wright's version,
Mr. Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat come across far better than
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who is presented mostly as an obstacle to
peace....Begin's life story is told far less sympathetically than are those of
Mr. Carter and Sadat... [He] is presented as "the man who embodied the most
wounded and aggressive qualities in the Israeli psyche. Obstruction, not
leadership, was his nature. (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2014)

Klein, on the other hand, sees the author's somewhat negative
characterization of Begin as “almost sympathetic.” He writes:

It is a measure of Wright's
fairness and subtlety that Begin comes across as an almost-sympathetic
character.

Klein himself characterizes Begin as a clearly unsympathetic character. “He
isn't dashing; he isn't eloquent; he doesn't smile,” writes Klein, who brands
him a “sourpuss extremist.”

As to Begin's approach to his religion, Klein is similarly denigrating:

His Judaism was litigious,
drawn from the Talmudic tradition of worrying the law to distraction, fighting
over every codicil.

The book reviewer is certainly entitled to his own negative opinion of Begin,
and even to his misinformed characterization of Talmudic tradition. But it is
his double standards in categorizing terrorism and terrorists that are most
disturbing.

As leader of the Irgun (Etzel), an armed underground organization in
Mandate Palestine that encouraged illegal immigration and carried out attacks
against the British, Menachem Begin was labeled a terrorist by the British and
competing Zionist groups. That designation, as well as the manner and type of
attacks that Etzel carried out, has been and continues to be debated.

There is far less debate about the infamous 1978 PLO-perpetrated
slaughter that came to be known as the “Coastal Road Massacre.” That attack
killed 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, and wounded 71 others.
Time Magazine called it “the worst terrorist attack in Israel's
history.”

But while Klein categorically labels Begin “a former
terrorist,” he refrains from using that term to characterize the Palestinian
perpetrators of the 1978 massacre. He blandly calls them “militants.”

Their intention, as two surviving terrorists confessed, was to seize
hostages at a luxury hotel, as well as to take UN representatives and
international ambassadors hostages who could be exchanged for Palestinian
prisoners in Israel, but that plan was aborted after the boats carrying the
terrorists landed 40 miles away from their destination. Instead, the terrorists
hijacked a bus, shot and threw grenades at passing cars, and eventually tried to
kill the passengers on the bus and others who crossed their path. The timing of
the attack was meant to destroy the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiation and to
damage tourism, according to a Fatah planner

None of these motives,
however, serve to blame Israel, and so Klein insidiously attributes a different
intention to the terrorists– one turns the story away from Palestinian terrorism
to an indictment of Israel under Menachem Begin's leadership. He writes:

The massacre was intended
as a provocation; a disproportionate Israeli response was assumed. And three
days later, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, which was then controlled by the
Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir Arafat. “Those who killed Jews in
our times cannot enjoy impunity,” the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin
said. More than a thousand Palestinian civilians were killed; more than 100,000
were left homeless. The world, including President Jimmy Carter, was horrified.
Following another invasion in 1982, Israel would occupy parts of southern
Lebanon until May 2000.

It is
hard to trust a book review about historical characters that is imbued with so
much apparent personal hostility that the "facts" are shaped to support the
reviewer's feelings. It is not surprising, however, that the New York Times
entrusted such a review to Joe Klein, who would reliably bash
Israel.

_________

If you read the article, you will catch this sentence of Klein

Begin didn’t cave on anything except giving up the Sinai Peninsula

as if that meant nothing.

And this is important:

When Carter proposed that Israel allow a Jordanian flag to
fly over the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Begin responded, “Never. . . . What
will happen when the Messiah comes?” He agreed to participate in the
negotiations because “President Carter knows the Bible by heart, so he knows to
whom this land by right belongs.”

Thursday, September 11, 2014

The agreement Carter brokered between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was the crowning achievement of his otherwise disappointing presidency. Sadat and Begin later were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But Wright's book is no paean to the leaders.Instead, he casts a critical and honest eye upon the three men.

Much of "Thirteen Days" details the fractured personal and public histories that brought Carter, Begin and Sadat to power and eventually to Camp David. And it portrays the negotiations themselves as a tense series of meetings between powerful men who whined, pouted and screamed to get their way...

...Sadat had helped set a peace process in motion with a surprise visit to Jerusalem in 1977. By agreeing to Carter's Camp David gambit, he hoped that Egypt might displace Israel as the Americans' key ally in the region. Begin was convinced the talks would fail — he was the only one of the three leaders to arrive at the summit without any proposals...

...As a condition for recognizing Israel, Sadat demanded that Begin return the Sinai Peninsula. Begin said such a deal would mean giving away a buffer zone of deserts and mountains in exchange for a mere written promise. Given Begin's own experiences with loss and betrayal, it was a difficult bargain to make. "There was only one thing standing in the way, and that was Begin's entire history," Wright says.

and there is this:

On the surface, Begin and Sadat had little in common. But earlier in their careers both had been prisoners of the British colonial authorities. Both had fought — often viciously — for the independence of their countries. Wright doesn't spare showing us the blood they had on their hands.

As a young Egyptian nationalist during World War II, Sadat joined a "murder society" that assassinated isolated British soldiers and later targeted Egyptian leaders who collaborated with British colonial authorities.

Begin was a Zionist from a young age. In 1929, he joined a paramilitary Jewish youth group in Poland. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust. In Palestine, he became among the fiercest of the rebels fighting the British for the creation of a Jewish state. He used tactics that would later come to be branded "terrorism."

"The transformation of terrorism as a primarily local phenomenon into a global one came about in large part because of the success of his tactics," Wright writes of Begin. "He proved that, under the right circumstances, terror works."

Thursday, September 4, 2014

I moved to Israel from New York in 1982, during another summer of fighting, and Israeli society was tearing itself apart. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was firing Katyusha rockets into residential areas of the Galilee; the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had invaded Lebanon, in Israel's first asymmetrical war against terrorists in urban neighborhoods. As civilian casualties in Beirut mounted, Israelis raged at each other in the streets. On Rosh Hashanah, I saw then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin emerge from a Jerusalem synagogue, to be greeted by left-wing demonstrators shouting, "Murderer!"

About Me

American born, my wife and I moved to Israel in 1970. We have lived at Shiloh together with our family since 1981. I was in the Betar youth movement in the US and UK. I have worked as a political aide to Members of Knesset and a Minister during 1981-1994, lectured at the Academy for National Studies 1977-1994, was director of Israel's Media Watch 1995-2000 and currently, I work at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. I was a guest media columnist on media affairs for The Jerusalem Post, op-ed contributor to various journals and for six years had a weekly media show on Arutz 7 radio. I serve as an unofficial spokesperson for the Jewish Communities in Judea & Samaria.